European safety regulation now permits a large share of automated-driving homologation evidence to be produced virtually, provided a validated physical-virtual facility generates it. We present a deployed hybrid Vehicle-in-the-Loop (ViL) platform that couples a real instrumented vehicle with a CARLA-based digital twin (DT) through a V2X message pipeline, and we report its first integrated operation on a public-road-representative test track. A real vehicle streams ETSI-compliant CAM/CPM messages into the DT, where a GPU-accelerated Cooperative Perception (CP) module fuses them into a probabilistic occupancy grid during scenario runtime. We demonstrate the platform on a multi-vehicle double T-intersection scenario, characterise the CP workload across nominal, rain and night conditions and five localization-noise levels, and discuss the platform's current architectural limits and the engineering targets they define. The results show that CP substantially widens field-of-view (FoV) coverage and improves occupied-cell recall, and that beyond a moderate localization-noise threshold, positioning uncertainty, and not weather, becomes the dominant error source. We outline the platform's trajectory toward a Mediterranean operational design domain (ODD) testing service.
This study is carried out to determine the flexural strength of normal reinforced concrete beams and reinforced beams strengthened with CFRP plates. Near-surface mounting (NSM) was used to strengthen the beam with CFRP. The study uses the finite element method, where the finite element model is developed by using LUSAS version 19.0. There are three types of beams strengthened by CFRP: beam strengthened by horizontally positioned CFRP plate, beam strengthened by double vertically positioned CFRP plate, and beam strengthened by CFRP rod. In LUSAS, the CFRP is assigned by bonding the concrete with the CFRP plate. Besides, the technique of near-surface mounting is also assigned in the LUSAS by assigning the surface with epoxy and grooves. The mechanical properties of concrete, steel and link are reduced to 5
A shell finite-element model of a stiffened aluminium wingbox panel, a laboratory structure shared by several experimental studies, is built with its plate-to-stiffener joints at the 78 physical fastener positions and calibrated against measured modal data, a six-parameter sensitivity update of the substructure moduli within ±20% reproducing the first five measured modes to 1.1–4.3% with modal-assurance values of 0.88–1.00. Making the fasteners nonlinear, at equal mesh, mass and damping, shows that joint nonlinearity enters the response strongly asymmetrically. Hardening is almost invisible, at most +1% in frequency, whereas softening or slipping the joints moves the first three resonances by -2.1, -4.9 and -9.2%, and friction removes up to 80% of the resonant peak before it recovers. Newmark integration of all 18,804 degrees of freedom and a harmonic balance condensed exactly onto the joints and continued in arclength agree to 5.5×10^-4. A projection-based nonlinear model order reduction then locates the criterion that a jointed structure imposes on a reduced basis. The binding quantity is not the linear response, which eleven vectors reproduce to better than 0.01%, but the receptance of the structure between the joints, of which 126 global eigenvectors carry about 2%, and without which the reduced model overpredicts the hardening shift of the fundamental by a factor of thirty and returns a value beyond the rigid-joint limit of the panel.
Medical data, by its nature, exhibit a high degree of heterogeneity on multiple levels ranging from (a) different modalities like images, text and time series, (b) diverse tabular schemata introduced by institutions and (c) completely unstructured textual information data provided by healthcare professionals. Data lakes are often used in medical data storage to consolidate all heterogeneous diverse data in a single, central location, where it can be saved "as is", without the need to impose a schema like a data warehouse does. Despite their flexibility, though, data lakes are notorious for the "data swamp" failure. Thus, providing a reliable data harmonization mechanism through metadata, without compromising integrity or flexibility, is a real challenge. To this end, knowledge graphs have attracted attention since they provide a dynamic way to depict relationships without a rigid schema-on-write approach. Additionally, another rigorous task relies on the interoperability of data: application of appropriate ML techniques on such a diverse nature of data is not an easy task, as a domain expert must decide the efficacy of a method to a specific data type or dataset. Metadata annotation can aid by tagging applicable operations, however this requires manual intervention, not to mention the plethora of existing datasets which lack such information. To tackle both challenges, in this paper, we propose a semantic data lake architecture that promotes data harmonization and incorporates a generative annotation process (i.e. LLMs) of non-labeled metadata collections to support the application of meaningful ML techniques. Building on top of this approach, we create a higher level of knowledge, identifying suitability of data with respect to applicable ML operations based on their data nature...
This paper introduces a probabilistic framework and hybrid validation methodology for V2X-enabled Collective Perception (CP) in complex traffic scenarios. The proposed Bayesian fusion algorithm extends the perceptual horizon of connected and autonomous vehicles by integrating heterogeneous sensor observations from multiple agents into a shared probabilistic occupancy grid. Each cell of this grid encapsulates both occupancy likelihood and uncertainty, enabling explainable and trustworthy situational awareness beyond the ego vehicle's field of view. To bridge the gap between simulation and real-world evaluation, a hybrid testing framework is developed, combining CARLA-based virtual environments with vehicle-in-the-loop experimentation. Experimental results in a roundabout scenario demonstrate a 260 percent increase in field-of-view coverage and a rise in occupied-cell recall from 0.82 (ego-only) to 0.94 (six-agent CP) under nominal localization conditions. Overall, the proposed approach provides a reproducible and interpretable foundation for validating CP systems, supporting the safe and certifiable deployment of cooperative autonomous vehicles.
